For eight years, a young Toronto couple put up with plaster dust and bother in
a struggle to turn a narrow, dilapidated Parkdale Victorian into their perfect
house.

They freshened and fixed whatever wasn't falling apart, while pushing rooms
open and overhauling to accommodate their home-based Internet enterprise. In
the end, nothing worked. By last summer, the tight architectural corsets and
constraints typical of Toronto's old working-class housing had baffled their
best efforts to make the house a home. The only thing left to do was move to a
place that didn't need a makeover.

What they found, instantly fell in love with and bought is one of south-east
Oakville's most unusual houses.

In a town that loves dwellings drenched in nostalgia for Old World elegance —
chateaux, villas, that kind of thing — this boldly Modernist composition of
glass and steel is strictly dormer-free. With floor-to-ceiling windows and
airy volumes — the living-room area is defined by a clear span rising two
storeys from the floor — this 5,000-square-foot house would argue out loud
with the heavy neo-traditionals nearby, were it not kept off the street by a
thick stand of old forest trees on its most public sides.

The principal entry to the house is a glass door in glass wall, set deep
behind a broad porch. Once inside, the visitor is faced by a wall and a
choice: to the left, into the couple's cul-de-sac home office area, or right,
into the light-flooded living room and beyond. From the living room, the
house's open space flows in abrupt steps past a floating wall of glass brick
into the ample kitchen, which is focused on a massive restaurant stove, and,
in another direction past the fireplace into the dining area.

The orientation of views toward the north — the south-facing skin of the house
is largely opaque — means that the available natural light is gentle, and
never hot. The bones of the structure are most beautifully exposed at night,
when powerful artificial lighting is switched on inside, and the glass block
of the house sparkles inside its shadowy perimeter of dark, tall tree-trunks.

This building was designed and constructed in the 1980s, according to its
present owner, by Oakville architect Brian Bancroft for himself. (Mr. Bancroft
could not be reached for comment.)

Despite its quite recent date, the house recalls the industrial-strength
Modernism of the early twentieth century. It is a hymn to the factory and
warehouse, and, in every girder, bolt, welded seam and glass wall, the
architect expresses his gratitude to Modern masters from Walter Gropius and
the early Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier.

While the tenants are currently pleased with their glass house — and very glad
to be done with the endless renovation of that stubborn Victorian — I wonder
how they will feel about it in, say, five years.

Mr. Bancroft's design is terribly earnest in its homage to the Modern heroes,
like a fan letter written by an awestruck undergraduate. Nothing softens or
surprises the strict discipline of the open-plan grid. The walls hit the floor
hard, without a baseboard to ease the transition of planes.

Space is made to flow even when it makes no sense for it to do so. The doors
to the house's few private room, for example, are narrow and somewhat mean, as
though the architect allowed them into his scheme only under protest. (While a
door was sensibly inserted by subsequent owners, the original scheme provided
for nothing but open passage between the master bedroom and the rest of the
house.) The sense of studious austerity in the house is heightened by the
blank whiteness of virtually every surface apart from a bit of window trim and
one short wall re-painted by the new owners. This clinical, too-narrow palette
can be changed, of course, with a few buckets of latex, and some judicious
application of stone or wood textures. (At present, the only visible wood in
the place is under your feet.)

The problem of privacy — the built-in headache of every Modernist glass house
— will be more intractable.

I certainly have no solution, other than removal of the whole kit and caboodle
to some secluded woodlot in the country. Any kind of screening, whether blinds
or drapes, compromises the wonderful things promised by walls of glass: a
seamless visual exchange between inside and outside, and the clean gleam and
glint of Modernism.

The remorseless system of the house will make it hard to renovate. But I would
not be astounded to learn that the owners — once the architectural honeymoon
is over — are back at it, in the midst of all the scaffolding and paint and
dust they thought they'd left behind forever in Parkdale.